Between slime, xenomorphs, and machines: hybrid alien iconicities and biosignature in the Alien franchise
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.1980-4016.esse.2025.238095Keywords:
Alien, Iconicity, Semiotics, BiosignatureAbstract
This article aims to analyze the iconicities of aliens in the Alien film franchise, with the goal of identifying common traits in the visual qualities that shape the construction of these extraterrestrial beings. The concept of biosignature is used as a starting point, understood as both a database and a source of inspiration from Earth's biological world for the creation and morphology of alien life forms. Iconicity, according to Charles Peirce, is defined as a sign that establishes a relationship of similarity with the characteristics of an object (CP 1.369). Icon is a type of original sign "whose significant virtue lies simply in its quality" (CP 2.92). The main focus of this investigation is the sensorialities constructed in these signs through the plastic visuality. A hypothesis arises: the film industry functions as a laboratory of semiosis and an alien continuum. The extraterrestrial beings that appeared earlier in cinematic chronology merge and agglutinate—literally, in symbiosis and biosignature—with those that came later. All of them draw from the common embryo/icon of H. R. Giger’s Necronomicon and Alien. Hybrid creatures are born from the corporeal conjunction of metal, silicon, plants, skins and slime: a collision between bodies and materialities.
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